Hashem Shaabani, a writer who composed verse (mostly apolitical) in both Persian and Arabic, was convicted by a tribunal last July of “waging war on God” and “spreading corruption on Earth.” He is a member of Iran’s Arab minority and founder of an institute promoting Arab culture; two years ago he confessed on state television to “separatist terrorism.”

“I myself question very much why the country needed something like this law. … I think it was seen internationally as a bad thing happening in Russia. I think in Russia, the view was different. The way people read this law is slightly different or sometimes very different.” (includes video and transcript)

On a cloudy December afternoon, Joshua Hammer follows the Nobel laureate from his native Cihangir (once the Greek quarter, later a red-light district, now Turkey’s Greenwich Village) to a lunch cart in a muddy plaza on the Bosporus, across the Golden Horn and past the grand and faded buildings of the late Ottoman government, to a favorite hole-in-the-wall near the Fatih Mosque,

“He often played creeps, but he rarely played them creepily. His metier was human loneliness — the terrible uncinematic kind that has very little to do with high-noon heroism and everything to do with everyday empathy — and the necessary curse of human self-knowledge.”

“A big question about her performance was, would she do it straight? Would she sing the anthem how it was written, or would she adopt the embellishments that have become de rigueur at big sporting events?”

“Lacking most of the usual traits that make for a compelling, ‘famous’ performer, Pete Seeger was instead possessed by song, not as a way to make it in the music business, but because he believed song was the glue, the bond that could bring people together.”

“Our tendency to equate outward wealth with inner worth invokes deep psychological responses, feelings of dominance and subordination, superiority and inferiority. This affects the way we see and treat one another.”

Gary Ginstling: “This success, I believe, has catalyzed the institution and given us a new confidence that we can be successful artistically, meet our community and educational goals and operate within our means.”

“A stocky, often sleepy-looking man with blond, generally uncombed hair who favored the rumpled clothes more associated with an out-of-work actor than a star, Mr. Hoffman did not cut the traditional figure of a leading man, though he was more than capable of leading roles.”

“In 2014, when it still feels like a radical act for a major regional theater to program more than one show with a cast of primarily actors of color in a season, controversies about cultural authority and appropriation can feel infuriatingly stagnant. We still have a numbers problem.”

Dylan Farrow’s “letter suggests a callous indifference by film professionals now celebrating their accomplishments in a series of ceremonies leading up to the March 2 Academy Awards. And it lands as Mr. Allen’s film ‘Blue Jasmine’ enters the Oscar balloting that begins Friday.”